Like most of C. S. Lewis’s books,
The Problem of Pain (1940) is full of unreferenced allusions to a great
variety of writers. Though it is perhaps never vitally important to identify
and explore Lewis’s sources, doing so often proves to be a rewarding enterprise.
Listed below are most of the book’s explicit references (usually quotations)
and many of the implicit ones (allusions ranging from the very obvious to the
fairly mysterious), each followed by the fullest possible statement of the
source in question.

Many
items also feature longer or shorter notes highlighting the relevance of
Lewis’s quotation or allusion for the point at issue – and occasionally
questioning that relevance.

In
addition, notes are given on some words, phrases and passages which are not
quotations or allusions but nevertheless seemed to call for the same sort of
treatment. These include echoes from Lewis’s own earlier and later writings –
usually later, since The Problem of Pain
appeared early in his writing career.

References
to paragraphs in the book appear in the format “VI·2” for “chapter VI, second
paragraph”. References to the three volumes of Lewis’s Collected Letters, published in 2000-2006, appear as CL1, CL2 and
CL3.

Double
question marks in bold type – ?? – follow
items for which I lack assurance that I can give relevant or accurate
information. Corrections and additions, including proposals for new
entries, are welcome. Updates
will be listed at the end when there are any to report.

Utrecht, The Netherlands

August 2015

Postscript, January 2018

A sequence of in-depth discussions of assorted
passages from The Problem of Pain is offered
here.

Dedication

The Inklings

» Circle of friends of C. S.
Lewis. For most of the 1930s and 1940sthey held weekly meetings in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen College, Oxford,
to read and discuss writing work in progress. Most of Lewis’s books published
around 1940 were dedicated to individual members of the group: Owen Barfield (The Allegory of Love, 1936), Lewis’s
brother Warnie (Out of the Silent Planet,
1938), Hugo Dyson (Rehabilitations,
1939), J. R. R. Tolkien (The
Screwtape Letters, 1942), and Charles Williams (A Preface to Paradise Lost, 1942).The present book is first
mentioned in a letter of Lewis to his brother of 11 November 1939 as he
describes a meeting of the Inklings.

The bill of fare ... consisted of a section of
the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams ... and a
chapter out of the book on the Problem of Pain from me. It so happened ... that
the subject matter of the three readings formed almost a logical sequence, and
produced a really first rate evening’s talk of the usual wide-ranging kind ...

Epigraph

George Macdonald. Unspoken
Sermons. First Series

» Lewis got to know and to
revere the Scottish novelist and poet in 1916 through Phan­tastes (1858), the first of Macdonald’s two fantasy novels,
and later came to regard him as his chief spiritual guide. George Macdonald
(1824-1905)was a Congregationalist
minister for three years (1850-53) before he took to literature. In addition to
much else he published three series of Unspoken Sermons
(twelve each) in 1867, 1885 and 1889. After Lewis had become a popular
Christian writer and speaker during the Second World War, he edited an Anthologyfrom the
works of Macdonald (1946) and in the Preface explicitly called him “my master”.
More than two-thirds of the extracts were taken from the Unspoken Sermons, of which Lewis confessed

My own debt to this book is almost as great as
one man can owe to another: and nearly all serious inquirers to whom I have
introduced it acknowledge that it has given them great help – sometimes
indispensable help towards the very acceptance of the Christian faith.

The epigraph is taken from
Series I, Nr. 2, “The Consuming Fire” on Hebrews 12:29.

Preface

Mr. Ashley Sampson

» Ashley Sampson (1900-1947) owned the Centenary
Press, a small publishing firm in London which became part of another London
publishing house, Geoffrey Bles, around 1930. Both publisher’s names appear on
the title page of the first edition of The
Problem of Pain. Lewis’s early book The
Pil­grim’s Regress (1933) had inspired Sampson to ask him to contribute a
book to a series called “Christian Challenge”, intended to introduce the
Christian faith to people outside the Church. Sampson’s initiative sparked off
both Lewis’s career as Christian apologist and Bles’s career as publisher of
Lewis’s religious work and some of his fiction.

Walter Hilton

» A 14th-century Augustinian canon (d. 1396),
spiritual writer, and head of the Priory at Thurgarton, Nottinghamshire. His
writings were popular in 15th-century England. Scala Perfectionis, or The
Ladder of Perfection, was his most famous book and was first printed in
1494.

“He jests at scars who never felt a
wound”

» Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet II.2, 1.

Chapter I:Introductory

chapter
motto

Pascal, Pensées, IV, 242, 243

»
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was a French philosopher and mathematician. His Pensées (“Thoughts”) is a collection of
long and short notes compiled and published posthumously. Section IV is titled
“Des moyens de croire” (“Of the means of belief”). Lewis has culled passages
from two consecutive items in the Brunschvicg edition published in 1897; its
numbers 242 and 243 correspond to 781 and 463 in the Lafuma edition (1962)–

the scientists think it likely
that very few of the suns of space ... have any planets

» Lewis relied for much of his knowledge of
modern physics and cosmology on popular works of the physicists Arthur
Eddington (The Nature of the Physical
World, 1928) and James Jeans (The
Mysterious Universe, 1931) and the mathematician-philosopher A. N.
Whitehead (Science and the Modern World,
1925). The conjecture about “exoplanets” (as they are now called) appears, for
example, at the end of chapter 8 of Eddington’s 1928 book in a section titled
“Formationof Planetary Systems”–

The solar system is not the typical product of development of a star; it is
not even a common variety of development; it is a freak. ... The density of
distribution of stars in space has been compared to that of twenty tennis balls
roaming the whole interior of the earth. The accident that gave birth to the
solar system may be compared to the casual approach of two of these balls
within a few yards of one another. The data are too vague to give any definite
estimate of the odds against this occurrence, but I should judge that perhaps
not one in a hundred millions of stars can have undergone this experience in
the right stage and conditions to result in the formation of a system of
planets.

The same idea is alluded to in Lewis’s 1945
essay “The Grand Miracle” and in the parallel chapter 14 of his book Miracles. It has since been proved
wrong. In 1992 the first “exoplanet” was discovered, twenty years later the
existence of more than 800 of them had been confirmed, and this number more
than doubled in the next three years, with thousands of further suspected
exoplanets cueing up to have their existence confirmed.

I·3|it would be

men of the Middle Ages thought
the Earth flat, but... Ptolemy ... one medieval popular text ...

»
Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus, c. 100-170
CE) was an ancient mathematician, astronomer and geographer of the second
century. He was a Roman who wrote in Greek and lived in Alexandria, Egypt. His
astronomical treatise – i.e. the book that bequeathed the “Ptolemaic” cosmology
to the Middle Ages – later became known under the title of its 9th-century
Arabic translation, Almagest.

Lewis in the
course of his writing career repeatedly argued more or less the same point,
often with the same reference to Almagest
(Book 5, chapter 1). Thus in The
Pilgrim’s Regress II.1, where Mr. Enlightenment tells John–

“... I dare say it would be news to you to hear that the
earth was round ... It is well known that everyone in Puritania thinks the
earth flat. It is not likely that I should be mistaken on such a point. ...”

Further instances are Lewis’s
1945 essays “Religion and Science” and “Christian Apologetics”; Miracles (1947) ch. 7, par. 8; and the
1956 lecture “Imagination and thought in the Middle Ages”–

That the Earth is, by any cosmic scale,
insignificant, is a truth that was forced on every intel­li­gent man as soon as
serious astronomical observations began to be made. ... Ptolemy’s compendium
... was accepted by the Middle Ages. It was not merely accepted by scholars; it
was re-echoed by moralists and poets again and again. To judge from the texts,
medieval man thought about the insignificance of Earth more persistently, if
anything, than his modern descendants. We even find quite popular texts
hammering the lesson home by those methods which the scientific popularizer
uses today.
(Essays in Medieval and Renaissance
Literature, 1967, p. 46)

From The Discarded Image (1964), ch. 3, p. 22, and ch. 5, pp. 97-98, it
appears that the “popular text” in question was the South English Legendary, a late-13th-century collection of lives of
the saints.

I·5|in all developed

Professor Otto

» Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), German theologian and scholar of comparative
religion. Lewis is referring to Otto’s book Das
Heilige (1917), translated John W. Harvey as The Idea of the Holy (1923). In chapter 2 Otto proposed to derive
his term “the numinous” from Latin numen
just as “ominous” is derived from omen;
the translator in his foreword notes that numen
is “the most general Latin word for supernatural divine power”.

Shakespeare ... “Under it my genius is rebuked”

» Macbeth
III.1, 54 (Macbeth speaking)–

There is none
but he [Banquo]
Whose being I do fear; and under him
My Genius is rebuk’d, as it is said
Mark Antony’s was by Caesar.

I·7|a modern example

The Wind in the Willows

» Published in 1908, this animal story by
Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932) became a classic of children’s literature.

I·9|going back about

Wordsworth ... that Passage in
the first book of the Prelude

» The
Prelude is a long poem by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in which he
describes the influences that contributed to his development as a poet. Written
in the years 1799-1805, it was not published until shortly after the poet’s
death. Lewis is referring to a passage in Book I beginning at line 356. While
rowing on a lake the young poet experienced the sight of how

a huge peak, black
and huge,
As if with voluntary power instinct
Upreared its head. I struck and struck again,
And growing still in stature the grim shape
towered up between me and the stars, and still,
For so it seemed, with purpose of its own
And measured motion like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned ...

...
after I had seen

That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Worked with a dim and undetermined sense
Of unknown modes of being; o’er my thoughts
There hung a darkness, call it solitude
Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes
Remained, no pleasant images of trees,
Or sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty forms, that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly trough the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.

Malory ... Galahad

» Thomas Malory (1400?-1470), author of Morte d’Arthur,a comprehensive prose retelling in twenty-one books of legends
about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Galahad, son of Sir
Lancelot du Lac, is the ideal type of a knight.

fell at the feet of the risen Christ “as one dead”

» cf. Revelation 1:17–

And when I
saw him, I fell at his feet as dead. And he laid his right hand upon me, saying
unto me, Fear not: I am the first and the last.

» Publius Vergilius Maro (70-19 BC), Roman poet. The Aeneid, called after its hero
Aeneas, is an epic poem written as a
continuation of Homer’s Iliad and describingthe preliminaries
of the history of Rome as a sequel to the history of Troy –

Tectum
augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis,

urbe fuit
summa, Laurentis regia Pici,

horrendum
silvis et religione parentum.

Stately
and vast, towering with a hundred columns,

his
house crowned the city, once the palace of Laurentian Picus,

awe-inspiring
with its grove and the sanctity of olden days.

(Translation
H. Rushton Fairclough 1918, Loeb Classical Library)

A Greek fragment ... Aeschylus
... “dread eye of their Master”

» Aeschylus (525-455 BC) was the earliest of the
three great Greek tragedians. Of his total output of perhaps more than 90 plays
only seven have survived in their entirety, plus hundreds of fragments. An
edition by the Oxford classical scholar Arthur Sidgwick appeared in 1899, but
more fragments have been coming to light afterwards; a recent edition appeared in 2008. A translation by H. W. Smith of
the fragment quoted by Lewis is found in the volume Aeschylus II
(1936) of the Loeb series, pp. 506-507–

Set God apart from mortal men, and deem not that he, like them, is fashioned
out of flesh. Thou knowest him not; now he appeareth as fire, unapproachable in
his onset, now as water, now as gloom; and he, even himself, is dimly seen in
the likeness of wild beasts, of wind, of cloud, of lightning, thunder, and of
rain. Ministers unto him are sea, and rocks, and every spring, and gathered
floods; before him tremble mountains and earth and the vast abyss of the sea and
the lofty pinnacles of the mountains, whensoever the flashing eye of their lord
[gorgon omma despoton] looketh on them. For all
power hath he; lo, this is the glory of the Most High God.

An editorial note says that “the Fragment was
ascribed to Aeschylus in antiquity probably because of its lofty conception of
God” (508).

I·12|the numinous is

a famous psycho-analyst ...
prehistoric parricide

» Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had died in London
around the time Lewis began writing The
Problem of Pain. Lewis is referring to a famous passage in Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Mental Lives
of Savages and Neurotics (1913), ch.
IV.5.

I·13|the moral experience

in Abraham... all peoples shall be blessed

» cf. Genesis 12:1-3–

Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out
of thy country ... I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that
curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

I·15|to ask whether

the long spiritual preparation
of humanity

» Although Lewis never
mentions G. K. Chesterton in this book, the first chapter is perhaps the best illustration
of the way Chesterton’s The Everlasting
Man (1925) provided him with a complete and plausible “Christian outline of
history” – as noted by Lewis in Surprised
by Joy, ch. 14. Lewis main addition to Chesterton’s scheme is Otto’s
concept of the Numinous.

I·16|why this assurance

regard the moral law as an
illusion, and so cut himself off ...

» Lewis’s fullest development of this line of
thought is found in The Abolition of Man
(1943).

the life-force

» The French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
developed the concept of élan vital
as a solution to
what he considered to be otherwise insoluble problems in the Darwinian theory
of evolution. In his once famous book Creative
Evolution (Évolution créatrice,
1907), chapter 2, he defined the term as

an internal push that has carried life, by more and
more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies,

The usual English rendering as “Life Force” got currency through the work of the
Irish-English dramatist George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950). Shaw equated the terms
élan vital and “life force” in the
preface to his five-part play Back to
Methuselah (1921). Both Shaw and Bergson were Nobel laureates for
literature in 1925 and 1927 respectively.

suspicious a priori lucidity
of Pantheism

» Lewis’s other references to
Pantheism in this book suggest that what he meant by this lucidity must be its monisticcharacter, i.e. the ultimate reduction of everything to a single thing,
force, or substance. Thus in chapter 10–

Pantheism is a creed not so much false as hopelessly behind the times.
Once, before creation, it would have been true to say that everything was God.
But God created: He caused things to be other than Himself ...

which modern science is slowly teaching us

» For Lewis’s chief published sources of
information about modern science see first note to this chapter, above.

Chapter II:Divine Omnipotence

chapter
motto

Thomas Aquinas

» (1225-1274), Italian Dominican friar,
theologian and philosopher, Saint of the Catholic Church since 1323. His Summa Theologiae, written towards the
end of his life and unfinished, was the first attempt at a comprehensive
theological system.

II·2|omnipotence means

“with God all things are possible”

» Matthew 19:24-26–

“And again I say unto you, It is easier for a
came to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom
of God.” When his disciples heard it, they were exceedingly amazed, saying,
“Who then can be saved?” But Jesus beheld them, and said unto them, “With men
this is impossible; but with God all things are possible.”

the original meaning in Latin

» Lewis appears to be
referring to the meaning of the original Latin noun of which “omnipotence” is
the English form, omnipotentia. This
is a late Latin word and not found in the Bible. Where the Latin Bible
(Vulgate) has omnipotens,the King James Bible of 1611 almost
invariably has “almighty” or “the Almighty”; in the New Testament it only
occurs in the Book of Revelation, and the Greek word is pantokratōr.

II·4|“all agents” here

all things are possible ...
intrinsic impossibilities are not things

» See first note to II·2,
above. Lewis’s observation is partly a pun based on the English phrasing, and
impossible if “all things” is read in the original Greek, panta, or in Latin as omnia,
or in Dutch and German as alles.

II·7|thereis no reason

in contrast with an “other”

» Lewis first developed this view in an early
piece of dense philosophical writing of 1928 under the title Summae metaphysices contra Anthroposophos
libri II (“Two Books of the Outline of Metaphysics against the
Anthroposopists”), as part of a protracted debate with his friend Owen Barfield
which Lewis later dubbed their “Great War”. See
especially Summa I.5, “The plurality of
souls, the existence of any soul, and a world of matter are all mutually
involved”.

the Blessed Trinity ...
something analogous to “society”

» See also Lewis’s development of this idea in
chapter 4 of Beyond Personality:The Christian Idea of God (1944), which
is the expanded text of his fourth series of radio talks for the BBC. The first
series of radio talks, in 1941, followed on an invitation from a BBC official
who had recognized Lewis’s talent for popularization in The Problem of Pain. A revised text of the four series was later
published in one volume as Mere
Christianity.

not merely ... the Platonic
form of love, but ... concrete reciprocities of love

» Plato (427-347 BC), one of the founding
fathers of Western philosophy, held that there are three levels of reality. The
highest level is the world of “forms” or “ideas” (Gr. eidē) because it is eternal; lowest is the world of concrete
objects because it is fleeting; in between are mathematical objects. Things on
the lowest level are dim and ever changing reflections of eternal, unchanging
“ideas”. Lewis is not talking of “Platonic love” as usually understood; he is
pointing out that God’s love, in addition to being the eternal “form” reflected
in concrete loves, is also itself concrete.

II·11 |society, then, implies

“matter” (in the modern, not the
scholastic sense)

» ... ??

II·12|but if matter

“trees for his sake would crowd into
a shade”

» cf. Alexander Pope, Pastorals (1709) II, “Summer”, 73-76–

Where-e’er you walk, cool
gales shall fan the glade,
Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a shade,
Where-e’er you tread, the blushing flow’rs shall rise
And all things flourish where you turn your eyes.

II·15|we can, perhaps

these occasions would be
extremely rare

» cf. the closing paragraph of Lewis’s book Miracles (1947): “God does not shake
miracles into Nature at random as if from a pepper-caster.”

Chapter III:Divine Goodness

chapter
motto

Traherne, Centuries of
Meditations

» Thomas Traherne (1638?-1674), English mystical writer and poet. He is chiefly known for
his Centuries of Meditations, a
volume of reflections on religion in poetical prose. “Century” in the title
means “collection of one hundred items”. The book was not published until 1908,
and consists of four “centuries” and the beginning of a fifth.

III·2|on the other hand

doctrine of Total Depravity

» If Lewis was thinking here of any particular
statement of the doctrine, it may have been the one given by John Calvin
(1509-1564) in the Institutes of the Christian Religion
II.1.9–

... all the parts of the soul were possessed by sin, ever since Adam
revolted from the fountain of righteousness. For not only did the inferior
appetites entice him, but abominable impiety seized upon the very citadel of
the mind, and pride penetrated to his inmost heart (Rom. 7:12; Book 4, chap.
15, sec. 10–12) ...Paul himself leaves
no room for doubt, when he says, that corruption does not dwell in one part
only, but that no part is free from its deadly taint. For, speaking of corrupt
nature, he not only condemns the inordinate nature of the appetites, but, in
particular, declares that the understanding is subjected to blindness, and the
heart to depravity (Eph. 4:17, 18).

(Translation Henry Beveridge,
1845).

III·3|the escape from

When I came first to the
University ... a set of young men

» This could refer both to 1917, when Lewis joined
an Officers’ Training Corps and the army soon after arriving in Oxford, or to
early 1919, when he had demobilized and could begin his studies in earnest. If
the latter, which seems most likely, the “set of young men” must have included
his lifelong friend Owen Barfield, whom he first met later that year.

In his loneliness and fixed­ness he [the ancient Mariner] yearneth to­wards
the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward;
and every where the blue sky be­longs to them, and is their appoin­ted rest,
and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter un­an­nounced,
as lords that are certainly ex­pec­ted and yet there is a silent joy at their
arrival.

III·6|by the goodness

“a good time was had by all”

» The phrase gained popularity as the title of a
1937 volume
of poetry by the English poet and novelist Stevie Smith.

The title “Inexorable Love” which I have given to
several individual extracts would serve for the whole collection. Inexorability
– but never the inexorability of anything less than love – runs through it all
like a refrain ...

III·10|another type is

“we are his people and the sheep of
his pasture”

» Psalm 100:3.

III·11|a nobler analogy

not even allowing Himself to
be called “good” because Good is the name of the Father

» cf. Mark 10:18 and Luke 18:19; also Matthew
19:17.

III·12|finally we come

“... than are the tender horns of cockled
snails”

» Shakespeare, Love’s Labour Lost IV.3, 334.

III·13|when christianity says

the consuming fire Himself

» cf. Hebrews 12:28-29–

... receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby
we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear: For our God is a
consuming fire.

The book’s general epigraph is
taken from a sermon on this Bible text; see note to the Epigraph at the beginning of these notes.

a burden of glory

» cf. 2 Corinthians 4:16-17–

... though our outward man perish, yet the inward man
is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is but for a moment,
worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.

See also Lewis’s sermon “The
Weight of Glory”, delivered in Oxford in 1941 and published in 1949.

like the maidens in the old
play, to deprecate the love of Zeus ... Prometheus Vinctus

» Now better known as Prometheus Bound, this is one of the seven surviving tragedies by
the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus (see note to I·9 above). Prometheus is
bound to a crag on the Scythian seashore as a punishment for his rebellion
against Zeus for the benefit of mankind. An unsuccessful attempt at mediation
is made Oceanus, whose daughters make up the choir of “maidens” in the play.
Lewis refers to their comment on hearing of Io’s lamentable fate as the
mistress of Zeus–

Never, oh never, august Fates, may ye behold me the partner of the bed of
Zeus, and may I be wedded to no bridegroom who descends to me from heaven. ...
But to me, when marriage is on equal terms, it is no cause of dread; and never
may the love of the mightier gods cast on me its irresistible glance. That were
indeed a war against which there is no warring, a source of resourceless misery;
and I know not what would be my fate, for I do not see how I could escape the
designs of Zeus.

– Translation by H. W. Smyth in the volume Aeschylus I (1922) of the Loeb
series, pp. 295-297.

The Impassible

» From Latin impassibilis and Greek apathēs,
“not susceptible to pain or injury”; also “not having or revealing emotions”.
The idea of God’s impassibility entered Christian theology possibly through the
work of Philo of Alexandria and is a prime example of pagan Greek influence on
early Christianity. The theological meaning of the word has always shaded into
“immutable” or, more specifically, “not susceptible to change by external
causes”.

III·14|the problem of reconciling

“well pleased”

» cf. Matthew 3:17, the voice from heaven after
Jesus is baptised–

“This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

King Cophetua

» A legendary African king who was
uninterested in women until he fell in love with a beggar girl. A ballad on the
subject was included by Thomas Percy in his Reliques of Ancient English
Poetry (1765), II.6. The theme was taken up by Alfred Tennyson in his poem
“The Beggar Maid” –

... Barefooted
came the beggar maid
Before the king Cophetua.
In robe and crown the king stept down,
To meet and greet her on her way ...

So
sweet a face, such angel grace,
In all that land had never been:
Cophetua sware a royal oath:
“This beggar maid shall be my queen!”

III·16|the truth is

Viola

» Sister to Sebastian in Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night.

A modern pantheistic
philosopher ... “when the Absolute falls into the sea it becomes a fish”

When the Absolute tumbles into the water it becomes a fish; so in asserting
itself under this or that condition of its own imposing it becomes Mr. Smith or
Mr. Jones.

Human love, as Plato teaches
us, is the child of Poverty

» Plato, Symposion
203b-e, Diotima speaking–

When Aphrodite was born, the gods made a great feast,
and among the company was Resource [Greek Poros]
the son of Cunning [Mētis]. And when
they had banqueted there came Poverty [Penia]
abegging, as well she might in an hour of good cheer, and hung about the door.
Now Resource, grown tipsy with nectar – for wine as yet there was none – went into the garden of Zeus, and there, overcome with
heaviness, slept. Then Poverty, being of herself so resourceless, devised the
scheme of having a child by Resource, and lying down by his side she conceived
Love [Erōs]. Hence it is that Love
from the beginning has been attendant and minister to Aphrodite, since he was
begotten on the day of her birth, and is, moreover, by nature a lover bent on
beauty since Aphrodite is beautiful. Now, as the son of Resource and Poverty,
Love is in a peculiar case. First, he is ever poor, and far from tender or
beautiful as most suppose him: rather is he hard and parched, shoeless and
homeless; on the bare ground always he lies with no bedding, and takes his rest
on doorsteps and waysides in the open air; true to his mother’s nature, he ever dwells with want. But he takes after
his father in scheming for all that is beautiful and good; for he is brave,
strenuous and high-strung, a famous hunter, always weaving some stratagem;
desirous and competent of wisdom, throughout life ensuing the truth; a master
of jugglery, witchcraft, and artful speech. By birth neither immortal nor
mortal, in the selfsame day he is flourishing and alive at the hour when he is
abounding in resource; at another he is dying, and then reviving again by force
of his father’s
nature: yet the resources that he gets will ever be ebbing away; so that Love
is at no time either resourceless or wealthy, and furthermore, he stands midway
betwixt wisdom and ignorance.

» It is hard to guess what Lewis hoped to add or
clarify by adding the German word for “appearance”.

III·17|the first condition

“His glory’s diminution”

» John Milton, Samson Agonistes (1671), 303. The “human irreverence” here is not
so much a refusal to worship as the entertaining of doubts about God’s justice:

Yet more there be who doubt his ways not just,
As to his own edicts found contradicting;
Then give the reins to wandering thought,
Regardless of his glory’s diminution,
Till, by their own perplexities involved,
They ravel more, still less resolved,
But never find self-satisfying solution.

Lewis again refers to this line in VI·8.

bidden to “put on Christ”

» Romans 13:12-14–

The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the
works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light ... put ye on the Lord
Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh to fulfil the lusts thereof.

The idea of “putting on
Christ” also appears, though not as a command, in Galatians 3:26‑27 –

For ye are all the children of God by faith in
Christ Jesus, For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on
Christ.

The power of God is put side by side with the weakness of men, not that He,
the perfect, may glory over His feeble children ... but that He may say thus:
“Look, my children, you will never be strong but with my strength. I have no other to give you.”

Chapter IV:Human Wickedness

chapter motto

Law. Serious Call

» William Law (1686-1761), English
theologian. As a non-juror he could not hold functions in the Church of
England; as author of A Serious Call to a
Devout and Holy Life (1728) he became an important inspiration for
Evangelical Christianity, notably influencing the Wesley brothers.

IV·1|the examples given

the Pagan mysteries

» “Mysteries” in the present context are secret religious
ceremonies by which people in the ancient Greek and Roman world hoped to attain
liberation, redemption, cleansing and a happy life after death.

Epicurean philosophy

» Epicurus (341-270 BC) was a Greek philosopher who considered Pleasure as the supreme good. One famous saying of
Epicurus explains why he did not fear death: “When we are, death is not come,
and when death is come, we are not”–
Letter to Menoeceus, in Diogenus Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Book X, 125; Loeb vol. 145, p. 651.

the Gospel appeared as good news

» The word “gospel” is derived from Old English gōd spell, “good message”. This is a
translation of Greek euaggelion, or
Latin evangelium, as found in many
places in the New Testament, e.g. Mark 1:14 and Romans 1:1.

IV·2|there are two

“Humanitarianism”

» Like “humanitarian”, this word dates from the
19th century and had various meanings. The broadly philanthropic meaning, which
is now the most current one, was often used with contemptuous or hostile
overtones referring to alleged exaggeration (see Oxford English Dictionary).

IV·3|the second cause

the effect of Psycho-analysis
on the public mind

» Cf. the reference to “a famous psycho-analyst”
(Sigmund Freud) in I·16.

the Trojans ... pulled the
Horse into Troy

» Homer, Odyssey
IV.271-273 and VIII.492ff; Virgil, Aeneid
II.

IV·4|a recovery of

the dying farmer who replied
to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance

» ... ??

IV·6|when we merely

the “wrath”
of God ... a mere corollary from God’s goodness

» Cf. Lewis’s The Pilgrim’s Regress X.3: “Men say that his love and his wrath are
one thing.” There is a possible allusion here to George Macdonald, Unspoken Sermons II.2,
“The Cause of Spiritual Stupidity” (on Mark 8:21)–

The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will
cross the threshold. He watches to see the door move from within. Every tempest
is but an assault in the siege of Love. The terror of God is but the other side
of His love; it is love outside, that would be inside – love that knows the
house is no house, only a place, until it enter.

Lewis quoted this passage as Nr. 84 in his Macdonald Anthology. However, “wrath” is
a word rarely used by Macdonald; and he doesn’t use it here. One of many other
possible inspirations is Rudolf Otto’s The
Idea of the Holy (see note to I·5, above), ch. IV.3, p. 24, perhaps with
reference to Jakob Böhme–

Love, says one of the mystics, is nothing else than quenched Wrath.

IV·10|4. we must guard

Quixotic

» i.e. heroic and idealistic in impractical and
often ridiculous ways – like Don Quixote, hero of the early-17th century
Spanish novel Don Quijote by Miguel
de Cervantes.

pocket of evil

» At the time of writing this book, Lewis had
already given fictional expression to this idea in his space-travel novel Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The
“Silent Planet” here is the Earth as a pocket evil and as such cut off from
communication with the other planets.

Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gotama, ...
Marcus Aurelius

» Zarathustra,
or Zoroaster was a Persian prophet who probably lived long before 1000 BC; Jeremiah is one of the major prophets of
the Hebrew Bible; Socrates was an ancient
Greek philosopher (469-399 BC) whose teachings were recorded in dialogues
written by his pupil Plato;Gotama, or Gautama the Buddha (the “enlightened one”), was a spiritual teacher of
ancient India (6th-5th century BC) whose teachings were the basis of Buddhism; Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor
(161-180 CE) whose Meditations became
a classic of Stoic philosophy.

justice, mercy, fortitude and temperance

» If prudence
(or wisdom) is substituted for mercy, the result is the set of four “Cardinal Virtues” found in
the work of ancient Greek, Roman and Christian authors (Plato, Cicero,
Augustine) and also in Lewis’s Mere
Christianity III.2. See, for example, Plato’s Phaedo, 68c-69b.

IV·12|6. perhaps my harping

Plato ... virtue is one

» Republic
445c (Jowett’s translation)–

The argument seems to have
reached a height from which, as from some tower of speculation, a man may look
down and see that virtue is one, but that the forms of vice are innumerable ...

Or in Robin Waterfield’s translation (1994)

... the impression I get from the vantage-point we’ve reached at this point
of our discussion is that while there’s only one kind of goodness, there are
countless types of badness ...

See also Plato’s early dialogue on whether
virtue is something teachable, Protagoras,
328d-334c.

IV·13|7. some modern
theologians

Some modern theologians

» ... ??

The road to the promised land
runs past Sinai

» As recounted in the book of
Exodus, three months after making their escape from Egypt the Israelites, led
by Moses, arrived in the desert of Sinai and “camped before the mount” (Ex.
19:3). Moses then climbs Mount Sinai, where God tells him that “if you [i.e.
the people] will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a
particular treasure unto me above all people: for all the earth is mine.”
During later encounters with Moses on Mount Sinai, God issues the Ten
Commandments – first in speaking, then on “two tables of testimony, tables of
stone, written with the finger of God” (31:18).

IV·14|8. “let
no man

the idealistic doctrine that
it is merely a result of our being finite

» The reference here may be, among other things,
to Lewis’s own earlier position. “Idealism” in this context is a philosophical
school or tendency which was on the wane but still dominant in Oxford when
Lewis arrived there as a student in and after the First World War. After an
early phase of materialistic atheism developed in his teens, Lewis became a
philosophical idealist himself in 1923-24. Perhaps briefly before his conversion
to Theism in mid-1930 he wrote, as part of his polemic with Owen Barfield of
those years, a short essay known as De
Bono et Malo (“On Good and Evil”) that seems to imply the “idealistic
doctrine” mentioned here:

What tends towards the recovery of our life as Spirit ... I call the
Better: what tends in the opposite direction I call the Worse. Good and Evil
are the ideal terms of these two directions; neither of which is revealed in
human experience. ... Absolute good, then, like absolute evil, is incompatible
with soul life ...

In
his last book, Letters to Malcolm,
ch. 8, Lewis mentioned the idea that “evil is inherent in finitude” as one he
associates with Reinhold Niebuhr (cf. note to V·5, below).

the Pauline epistles

» i.e. the thirteen New
Testament “books” after the Book of Acts that were written as letters by the
Apostle Paul to various Christian communities and some individuals. In seven
cases the authorship is disputed. Lewis is presumably thinking of such
(genuinely Pauline) passages as Romans 7:13-26 and Galatians 5:17.

Respect is so far from being a feeling of pleasure that we only reluctantly give
way to it as regards a man. ... Even the moral law itself in its solemn majesty is exposed to this
endeavour to save oneself from yielding it respect. ... Nevertheless .. solittle
is there pain in it that if once
one has laid aside self-conceit and allowed practical influence to that
respect, he can never be satisfied with contemplating the majesty of this
law, and the soul be­lieves itself elevated in proportion as it sees the holy
law elevated above it and its frail nature. (par. 9; Abbot p. 170)

the holier a man is, the more
fully he is aware

» Cf. the way Lewis expressed this insight in
his 1945 novel That Hideous Strength,
ch. 10.4, where Dr Dimble looks back on his own recent fit of “real
anger”. Quoting the words “thus I shall always do, whenever You leave me to
myself” as part of Dimble’s musings, Lewis alludes to 17th-century spiritual
writer Nicolas Herman. In the latter’s work (mentioned in the one footnote to
ch. 7), the phrase illustrates his growing awareness
that the nearer a man is to God, the more this boon is offset by feelings of
utter unworthiness

Chapter V:The Fall of Man

chapter motto

Montaigne

» Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), French
writer. His main work, the Essais (1588), is a large collection of
tentative reflec­tions on his reading and the develop­ment of his own ideas.
Lewis is quoting from the longest chapter (II.12), “Apologie for Raimond de
Sebonde”. The original French
phrase is

The first law
that ever God gave to man was a law of pure obedience: it was a commandment
naked and simple, wherein man had nothing to inquire after or to dispute,
forasmuch as to obey is the proper office of a rational soul, acknowledging a
heavenly superior and benefactor. From obedience and submission spring all
other virtues, as all sin does from self-opinion. And, on the contrary, the
first temptation that by the devil was offered to human nature, its first
poison, insinuated itself by the promises that were made to us of knowledge and
wisdom : “Eritis sicut dii, scientes bonum et malum [Genesis 3:5].”

Montaigne’s “apology” is nominally a defence
of a 15th-century work of natural theology by the Catalan monk Raymond Sebond.
He defends it first against anti-intellectual attacks and then, at very much
greater length, against intellectual ones; his own position is one of staunch
and happy allegiance to the Catholic Church as the established religion on the
one hand, and on the other, rather more emphatically, a profound and
wide-ranging scepticism
about human knowledge.

Though Lewis loved the Essais he
certainly did not regard Montaigne as a spiritual guide, as illustrated by a remark in a 1955 letter to
Dorothy Sayers: “I hope you love him! Love – I didn’t say approve or esteem”
(CL3, 635). In his own early book ThePilgrim’s Regress (ch. V/4) the
allegorical character called Mr. Sensible quotes Montaigne’s famous motto Que
sais-je? (“What do I
know?”), which is also found in the Apology for Raymond Sebond. In another letter, referring to Mr. Sensible Lewis
called Montaigne “the best specimen
of that type” (CL3, 497).

The passage
on obedience is also quoted in chapter 11, “Hierarchy”, in A Preface to Paradise Lost, where Lewis suggests that
Shakespeare subscribed to the same view.

V·1|the christian answer

we sinned “in Adam”

» The phrase “sinning in Adam”
was used by some Church Fathers including Ambrosius and Augustine on the basis
of what St Paul wrote in Romans 5:12, but it is not, as a phrase, actually
found there–

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the
world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have
sinned ...

The word “by” here represents
Greek dia; more problematically, “for
that” represents Greek eph ōi (with eph as a form of epi). In modern translations this is often rendered as “because”,
but this is disputable, and the antecedent of ōi is uncertain. The only more or less related “in Adam” phrase in
the New Testament is in I Corinthians 15:22–

For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall
all be made alive.

Here the preposition “in”
represents Greek en.

See also note to V·4, below.

“immortal germ plasm”

» The germ-plasm theory was
developed in the late 19th century by German biologist August Weismann. It
served to establish the modern insight that biological heredity is not a matter
of just any cell or organ as such potentially acquiring useful characteristics,
but of a special category of germ cells as distinct from somatic cells (body
cells). Weismann’s term Keimplasma is
com­monly rendered as “germ plasm”. Today, the concept is usually expressed by
terms like “genetic material”. The point to note with regard to Lewis’s use is
that Weismann’s theory brought out the basically ineradicable nature of
hereditary characteristics.

Some of the very rudest
savages, primitive in every sense in which anthropologists use the word, ...
are found to have a pure monotheism with a high moral tone. A missionary was
preaching to a very wild tribe of polytheists, who had told him all their
polytheistic tales, and telling them in return of the existence of the one good
God who is a spirit and judges men by spiritual standards. And there was a
sudden buzz of excitement among these stolid barbarians, as at somebody who was
letting out a secret, and they cried to each other, “Atahocan! He is speaking
of Atahocan!”

V·4|science,
then, has

the modern theologian ... N. P. Williams

» Published in 1927, when the author became Lady
Margaret Professor of Divinity in Oxford, the book cited here became a
20th-century classic in its field. Lewis read it shortly before he wrote The Problem of Pain, perhaps as a
preparation. From a letter of 24 October 1940 it appears he was not much
impressed by it (CL2, 450):

... to tell you the truth [I] didn’t find [Williams] very helpful. The man
who can dismiss “sinned in Adam” as
an “idiom” and identify virtue with the herd instinct is no use to me, despite
his very great learning.

V·5|this
sin has

“the journey homeward to habitual self”

» John Keats, Endymion (1818) II, 276. After exploring a “marble gallery” or
“mimic temple” where he has acquainted himself “with every mystery, and awe”,
the hero sits down and then,

when new wonders ceas’d to
float before,
And thoughts of self came on, how crude and sore
The journey homeward to habitual self!

“myth” in the Socratic sense

» In addition to Lewis’s footnote, see the
article “Plato’s Myths”
by Cătălin Partenie in the online Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu.
The following passage in section 2 seems especially relevant (with a reference
to the 1998 book Plato the Myth Maker
by L. Brisson)–

The myths Plato invents, as
well as the traditional myths he uses, are narratives that are non-falsifiable,
for they depict particular beings, deeds, places or events that are beyond our
experience: the gods, the daemons, the heroes, the life of soul after death,
the distant past, etc. Myths are also fantastical, but they are not inherently
irrational and they are not targeted at the irrational parts of the soul. ...
[I]n the Republic, Socrates says that until philosophers take control of
a city “the politeia whose story we are telling in words (muthologein)
will not achieve its fulfillment in practice” (501e2–5). The con­struction of
the ideal city may be called a “myth” in the sense that it depicts an imaginary
polis (cf. 420c2: “We imagine the happy state”). In the Phaedrus (237a9,
241e8) the word muthos is used to name “the rhetorical exercise which
Socrates carries out” (Brisson, 144), but this seems to be a loose usage of the
word.

Dr. Niebuhr’ssense(note)

» Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), American
theologian. In a 1958 letter Lewis reports that he had read “one book of
Niebuhr’s – I can’t remember the title – and on the whole reacted against it”
(CL3, 979). In a letter of 14 January 1940 to his brother he men­tions his
reading Niebuhr’s 1935 book An
Interpretation of Christian Ethics and finding it “very disagreeable but
not unprofitable” (CL2, 324). Lewis may well have been thinking of the
following passage from Niebuhr’s first chapter (pp. 12-13):

It is the genius of true myth to suggest the dimension of depth in reality
and to point to a realm of essence which transcends the surface of history, on
which the cause-effect sequences, discovered and analysed by science, occur.
... The religious myth ... points to the ultimate ground of existence and its
ultimate fulfillment. Therefore the great religious myths deal with creation
and redemption. But since myth cannot speak of the trans-historical without
using symbols and events in history as its forms of expression, it invariably
falsifies the facts of history, as seen by science, to state its truth.

V·6|for long centuries

brutes sporting before Adam ... God came first
in his love and in his thought, and that without painful effort

» Several elements of this speculative account
of Paradisal man appear in Lewis’s fantasy about the “Green Lady”, or Paradisal
woman, in his second Ransom novel, Perelandra
(1942), for example in the second half of chapter 5.

V·9|this act of

the difficulty about the first sin

» Lewis’s earliest published mention of Perelandra, in a letter of 9 November
1941 to Sister Penelope, seems to refer to this same difficulty of conceiving
precisely what kind of creature and action were in­volved by the Fall. Having
just finished describing Ransom’s first conversation on Venus with “the Eve of
that world” (i.e. presumably chapter 5), he mused:

I may have embarked on the impossible. This woman has got to combine
characteristics which the Fall has put poles apart – she’s got to be in some
ways like a Pagan goddess and in other ways like the Blessed Virgin.

V·10|up to that moment

“Dust thou art, and unto dust ... ”

» Genesis 3:19.

Hooker’s conception of Law

» For Hooker, see note to the motto of ch. VII,
below. While that motto does refer to “law”, it is less immediately relevant to
Lewis’s present purpose than a quotation found in the Appendix to The Abolition of Man, VIII.B:

The soul then ought to conduct the body, and the spirit of our minds the
soul. This is therefore the first Law, whereby the highest power of the mind
requireth obedience at the hands of all the rest. (Laws of Eccl. Polity I.8.6)

The same quotation is found in the helpful
context of the section on Hooker in Lewis’s English
Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 460. As he points out and argues,
few systems or models of the universe “are more filled – one might say, more
drenched – with Deity” than Hooker’s (459). Having established this, Lewis goes
on to reflect that

[s]ometimes a suspicion crosses our mind that the doctrine of the Fall did
not loom quite large enough in his universe. Logically, we must grant, it was
pivotal: it is only because Adam fell that supernatural laws have come in at
all, replacing that natural path to beatitude which is now lost. ... It is only
because Adam fell that we need “public regiment” ...

V·11|god might have

not necessary to suppose that they also have
fallen

» When Lewis wrote this, his first great
imaginative development of this idea had already been published as the
science-fiction novel Out of the Silent
Planet (1938); the next was to follow in its sequel Perelandra (1942).

V·13|with this i have

“inter-inanimation”

» i.e. “mutual inspiration”. The
related verb inter-inanimate seems to
have been coined by the English poet John Donne (1572-1631) in his poem “The
Ecstasy” (or “Exstasie”), 41-44:

When love
with one another so
interinanimates two soules,
That abler soule, which thence doth flow,
Defects of lonelinesse controules.

The
Oxford English Dictionary only has an entry for “interanimate” (without
the inserted -in-), quoting Donne’s
line as the only source and dubbing the word “rare”. Lewis may have been an
uncommonly frequent user of the word since it appears in at least five of his
books – mostly as the variant with -in-.
(As Helen Gardner notes in her 1965 edition of Donne’s poems, the great
majority of old manuscript sources for this poem have “interinanimates”,
not “interanimates”, but the latter variety is the one found in the first
edition, 1633.)

excluded by the whole tenor of our faith

» This “whole tenor” seems to be briefly defined
by Lewi’s own observation, in the chapter on Divine Omnipotence (II·7), that

being Christians, we learn from the doctrine of the Blessed Trinity that
something analogous to “society” exists within the Divine being from all
eternity – that God is Love, not merely in the sense of begin the Platonic form
of love, but because, within him, the concrete reciprocities of love exist
before all worlds and are thence derived to the creatures.

Chapter VI:Human Pain

chapter
motto

Theologia Germanica

» A mystical text in
German dating from the mid-14th century, with guidelines for a Christ-like life
that would lead to perfect union of God and man. The treatise was much
commended by Martin Luther, who devised the title – Theologia Deutsch – to highlight the fact that the text was not in
Latin. The further implication was that the book had all the advantages of
plain language and simple devotion unencumbered by academic learning.

VI·3|now the proper

... the patters which man was made to imitate
... [T]here ... is Heaven, and there the Holy Ghost proceeds

» Lewis appears to be suggesting a subtly
reconciling position in an ancient and still unresolved controversy within
Christendom: the so-called Filioque issue. Latin Filioque means “and the Son”, and the
issue is whether the Holy Ghost, as the third Person of the Trinity, proceeds
“from the Father” or “from the Father and
the Son”. The statement under discussion is an article from the Nicene
Creed:

And I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord
and Giver of Life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son,

The addition of Filioque here represents the “Western” position, while the Eastern
Church holds to the view that the Son and the Ghost each “proceed” from the
Father, as suggested by John 8:42 and 15:26 respectively.

Lewis
gave a fuller statement of his view in his fourth series of BBC radio talks, Beyond Personality (1944), later
reprinted as book IV of Mere Christianity
(1952), ch. 4.

The most
noble repentance (if a fallen being can be noble in his fall), the most
decorous conduct in a conscious sinner, is an unconditional surrender of
himself to God ... He is a runaway offender; he must come back, as a very first
step, before anything can be determined about him, bad or good; he is a rebel,
and must lay down his arms.

Lewis quotes the same phrase almost literally,
but without reference, in Mere
Christianity IV.4, “The Perfect Penitent”.

the very history of the word “Mortification”

» ... ??

error and sin ... the deeper they are the less
their victim suspects their existence

» Cf. Perelandra,
ch. 17–

“There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a
darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the
knowledge of sleep.”

VI·5|the
human spirit

Sadism and Masochism

» Each term is derived from the name of a novelist
who described the practice in question: Sadism is named after the French writer
Marquis de Sade (1740-1814); “Masochism”, a word coined in 1886 in a book on
sexual psychopathology, refers to the 19th-century Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836–1895).

» Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), English
philosopher. His fundamental proposition was that all human action is
ultimately based on self-interest. Lewis is quoting from one of Hobbes’s main
works, Leviathan, or the Matter, Form,
and Power of a Commonwealth, Eccleciastical and Civil (1651).

VI·7|when
our ancestors

God’s “vengeance”

» Acts or intentions of vengeance are frequently
attributed to or claimed by God throughout the Bible, as in Deuteronomy
32:35-36, Isaiah 35:4 (also including “recompence”), Romans12:19 and Hebrews
10:30, though hardly in the four Gospels.

» Aldous Huxley (1895-1963), English novelist
and essayist. Lewis is probably thinking of Huxley’s then recent book Ends and Means (1937), which is also
alluded to later in this same chapter; see note to VI·15, below.

VI·8|if
the first

St. Augustine ... “God wants to give us something ...

» Lewis seems to use the same reference in a
letter of 31 March 1958 to Mary Willis Shelburne (CL3, 930). In a footnote to
that letter Walter Hooper suggests Lewis was thinking of a passage in
Augustine’s homily (or exposition) on Psalm 122, in the section on the second
half of verse 6 (Et abundantia
diligentibus te, “they shall prosper that love thee”):

... “And
plenteousness,” he addeth, “for them that love thee.” ... How have they become
rich? Because they gave here what they received from God for a season, and
received there what God will afterwards pay back for evermore. Here, my
brethren, even rich men are poor. It is a good thing for a rich man to acknowledge
himself poor: for if he think himself full, that is mere puffing, not
plenteousness. Let him own himself empty, that he may be filled.

What is
essential in the moral worth of actions is that the moral law should directly determine the will. If the de­ter­mination
of the will takes place in con­formity in­deed to the moral law, but only by
means of a feeling, no matter of what kind, which has to be pre­sup­posed in
order that the law may be sufficient to determine the will, and therefore not
for the sake of the law, then the
action will pos­sess legality but
not morality.

Duty! Thou sublime and mighty
name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuat­ing, but requirest submis­sion,
and yet seekest not to move the will by threatening aught that would arouse
natural aversion or terror, but merely holdest forth a law which of itself
finds entrance into the mind, and yet gains reluctant reverence (though not
always obedience), a law before which all in­clinations are dumb, even though
they secretly counter-work it; what origin is there worthy of thee, and where
is to be found the root of thy noble descent which proudly re­jects all
kindred with the inclinations; a root to be derived from which is the
indispensable condi­tion of the only worth which men can give them­selves?

(Abbott p. 180)

he has been accused of a “morbid frame of mind”

» ... ??

against Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by
Aristotle ... as a Christian I suggest the following solution

» Lewis’s Christian solution to what he calls
the “conflict between the ethics of duty and the ethics of virtue” was perhaps
partly inspired by the medieval English mystic Julian of Norwich, as appears
from a letter he wrote to Owen Barfield of 2 June 1940 (CL2, 418-419). In March
of that year Lewis had read Julian’s Revelations
of Divine Love, and in the letter he noted that

[she] seems, in the Fifteenth century, to have rivalled Thomas Aquinas’
reconciliation of Aristotle and Christianity by nearly reconciling Christianity
with Kant.

On the other hand, in the first paragraph of his
1941 sermon “The Weight of Glory” Lewis points out that

[i]f there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own
good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit
that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the
Christian faith.

Aristotle ... the more virtuous a man becomes
the more he enjoys virtuous actions

» ...

VI·12|it has sometimes

whether God commands certain things because they
are right, or ...

» In philosophical theology, the question has
long been known as the “Euthyphro dilemma”.

with Hooker, and against Dr. Johnson

» For Hooker, see note to the motto of ch. VII,
below. Lewis’s footnote contains an error: “I, i, 5” should be “I, ii, 5”, i.e.
he is referring to the second, not the first chapter in Book I of Hooker’s Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity.

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), one of the great
figures of English literary history, was a poet, essayist, biographer,
novelist, and lexicographer, and also famous as a conversationalist thanks to
the 1791 biography by James Boswell, The
Life of Dr. Johnson. It is hard to say which passage in Boswell or in
Johnson’s writings Lewis is referring to. ... ??

Paley

» William Paley (1743-1805), English theologian.
... ??

VI·13|we therefore agree

we agree with Kant so far as to say that there
is one right act ... which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures
unless it is unpleasant

» Obviously Lewis does not mean that Kant made a
similar statement about the self-surrender of fallen creatures; he means that
this crucial aspect of a Christian “solution” accords with Kant’s view of
morality as a necessarily unpleasant affair. However, Lewis has so far only
suggested that this view of morality is something Kant was “accused of”
(VI·11). Thus Lewis appears to have been in two minds as to whether the
accusation was true. At the same time, he has just distinguished “obedience”
from “the content of our obedience”, and the distinction appears to allow him
to be slightly more Kantian than Kant on the unpleasantness of morality. Some
actually Kantian passages on that subject are found in the chapter from Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (I.1.3)
cited above :

For all inclination and
every sensible impulse is founded on feel­ing, and the negative effect
produced on feeling (by the check on the in­cli­nations) is itself feeling;
consequently, we can see à priori
that the moral law, as a deter­min­ing principle of the will, must by thwart­ing
all our inclinations pro­duce a feeling which may be cal­led pain; and in
this we have the first, perhaps the only, instance in which we are able from à priori con­si­dera­tions to deter­mine
the relation of a cog­­nition (in this case of pure prac­tical reason) to the
feeling of pleasure or dis­pleasure. (par. 3, Abbot p. 165)

The consciousness of a free submis­sion of the will to the
law, yet com­bined with an inevitable con­straint put upon all in­clinations,
though only by our own rea­son, is respect for the [moral] law. ... An action
which is objectively practical according to this law .. is duty, and this .. includes in its
concept practical obliga­tion ...
The feeling that arises from the conscious­ness of this obligation is .. prac­tical
only ... As submission to the law
.. it contains in it no pleasure, but on the contrary, so far, pain in the
action. On the other hand, however, ... it also con­tains something elevating ...

(par. 12, Abbott p. 173)

[I]f a rational creature
could ever reach this point, that he thor­ough­ly likes to do all moral laws, this would mean that there does not
exist in him even the pos­sibility of a desire that would tempt him to
deviate from them; for to overcome such a desire always costs the subject
some sacri­fice and therefore re­quires self-com­pulsion, that is, inward con­straint
to something that one does not quite like to do; and no creature can ever
reach this stage of moral disposition.

If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross,
and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever
will lose his life for my sake shall find it.

“backward mutters of dissevering powers”

» Milton, Comus,
817.

uncreative spell

» Compare IX·6, where Lewis uses the word
“uncreating” rather than “uncreative”. The latter form seems to be the more
appropriate in each case; it offer the best parallel to the phrase just quoted
from Milton.

Christ on Calvary ... surrender to God does not
falter though God “forsakes” it

The “forsaking” comes in a Hebrew line quoted
from the beginning of Psalm 22:2.

Lewis, in thus describing the martyrdom or
“accepted Death” as “the supreme enacting and perfection of Christianity”, was
almost certainly remembering George Macdonald’s meditations on the subject. For
some relevant passages see Lewis’s George
Macdonald: An Anthology (1946), items 31-39, taken from
Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons,
Series I, Nr. 8, “The Eloi”.

There
are similar allusions to Macdonald in Lewis’s Screwtape
Letters (1942), letter VIII.

VI·15|the
doctrine of death

the Mysteries

» See note to IV·1, above.

Mr. Huxley ... “non-attachment”

» cf. the reference to Aldous Huxley in VI·7,
above. Huxley presented the concept of non-attachment in chapter 1 of his book Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature
of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realisation (1937), pp.
2-4:

Among [the] bewildering multiplicity of ideals which shall we choose?The answer is that we shall choose none. ...
[A]ll the ideals of human behaviour formulated by those who have been most
successful in freeing themselves from the prejudices of their time and place
are singularly alike. ... The enslaved have held up for admiration now this
model of a man, not that; but at all times and in all places, the free have
spoken with only one voice. It is difficult to find a single word that will
adequately describe the ideal man of the free philosophers, the mystics, the
founders of religions. “Non-attached” is perhaps the best. The ideal man is the
non-attached man. ... Non-attachment to self and to what are called “the things
of this world” has always been associated in the teachings of the philosophers
and the founders of religions with attachment to an ultimate reality greater
and more significant than the self. Greater and more significant than even the
best things that this word has to offer.

an “eternal
gospel”

» While the term may ultimately derive from
Revelation 14:6, Lewis had himself previously used the Latin form, evangelium eternum, to describe his own
pre-Christian brand of pantheism as expounded by the allegorical figure of Mr.
Wisdom in The Pilgrim’s Regress, Book
VII, ch. 12:

...so far as I am at all, I am Spirit, and only by being Spirit maintain my
short vitality as soul. See how life subsists by death and each becomes the
other: for Spirit lives by dying perpetually into such things as we, and we also
attain our truest life by dying to our mortal nature ... for this is the final
meaning of all moral precepts, and the goodness of temperance and justice and
of love itself is that they plunge the red heat of our separate and individual
passions back in the ice brook of the Spirit ... What I tell you is the evangelium eternum.

Much less directly, though plausibly in view of
the preceding reference to Aldous Huxley, there might be a connection with Huxley’s Perennial
Philosophy. However, his book of that title was not published
until 1945 and its focus is on personal enlightenment rather than on any
doctrine of death; the originally Latin term philosophia perennis originated in 16th-century Neo-Platonism.

the Light that lighteneth every man

» cf. John 1:7-9.

[John the Baptist] came for a witness, to bear
witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light,
but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world.

our script need only be a copy

» Cf. the book’s general motto, taken from
Macdonald’s Unspoken Sermons I.2:
“The Son of God suffered ... that their sufferings might be like His.”

no quarrel, like Plato, with the body as such

» In Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, Socrates explains why, as a philosopher, he should be and
actually is quite happy to die that same day. Death is the moment of the soul’s
release from the body as from a “prison” (62b, 82e), and such a release is in
many ways precisely what a philosopher has always been striving for:

The lovers of knowledge are conscious that the
soul was simply fastened and glued to the body – until philosophy received her,
she could only view real existence through the bars of a prison, not in and
through herself; she was wallowing in the mire of every sort of ignorance; and
by reason of lust had become the principal accomplice in her own captivity.
This was her original state; and then, as I was saying, and as the lovers of
knowledge are well aware, philosophy, seeing how terrible was her confinement,
of which she was to herself the cause, received and gently comforted her and
sought to release her, pointing out that the eye and the ear and the other
senses are full of deception, and persuading her to retire from them, and
abstain from all but the necessary use of them, and be gathered up and
collected into herself, bidding her trust in herself and her own pure
apprehension of pure existence, and to mistrust whatever comes to her through
other channels and is subject to variation; for such things are visible and
tangible, but what she sees in her own nature is intelligible and invisible.
... [E]ach pleasure and pain is a sort of nail which nails and rivets the soul
to the body, until she becomes like the body, and believes that to be true
which the body affirms to be true; and from agreeing with the body and having
the same delights she is obliged to have the same habits and haunts, and is not
likely ever to be pure at her departure to the world below, but is always
infected by the body; and so she sinks into another body and there germinates
and grows, and has therefore no part in the communion of the divine and pure
and simple.
–– Phaedo 82e-83d, translated by
Benjamin Jowett

In so far as Lewis ever recognized a similar
sort of quarrel, he considered soul and body as being tarred with the same
brush:

Bless the body. Mine has led me into many scrapes, but I have led it into
far more.
–– Letters to Malcolm (1964), ch. 3.

“You are always dragging me down,” said I to my Body. “Dragging you down!” replied my Body. “Well I like
that! Who taught me to like tobacco and alcohol? ... That’s Soul all over; you
give me orders and then blame me for carrying them out.”
–– “Scraps” (1945), in God in the Dock
(1970), p. 216-217; see also Lewis’s Letters
to Malcolm, ch. 3.

nothing to distinguish them from ... “sweet reasonableness”

»
The term was coined by Matthew Arnold, who frequently used it in his Literature and Dogma (1873). Thus in
chapter III, “Religion new-given” (p. 66 in the 1883 Popular Edition):

Jesus Christ’s new and different way of putting
things was the secret of his succeeding where the prophets failed. And this new
way he had of putting things is what is indicated by the expression epieikeia, an expression best rendered
... by the phrase “sweet reasonableness”.

In equating his own “ideal of urbanity and sweet
reasonableness” with “the spiritual life as conceived by Christianity”, as
Lewis suspected he did(Studies in Words, ch. 9.vii, p. 242), Arnold was ignoring that
this reasonableness was only the sweet variant of an ideal that might take very
bitter forms.

VI·16|all
arguments in

“quite o’ercrows my spirit”

» Shakespeare, Hamlet V.2, 435.

O,
I die, Horatio!
The potent poison quite oʼer-crows my spirit.

VI·17|in
estimating the

the beneficence of fear ... the present war. My
own experience ...

» Lewis describes the experience, with regard to
the approach and onset of the war, in several letters of the time to Owen
Barfield; see CL2, 231-232 (12 Sept. 1938), 266-268 (August 1939) and 418-419
(2 June 1940).

» The phrase was coined by the poet
John Keats in a letter written in 1819 to his brother and sister:

In how
lamentable a case do we see the great body of the people (...) The whole
appears to resolve into this – that man is originally “a poor forked creature”
subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to
hardships and disquietude of some kind or other. (...) The common cognomen of
this world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears” from
which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and
taken to Heaven – What a little circumscribed straightened notion! Call the
world if you please “the vale of
soul-making”. Then you will find out the use of the world (...) I will call
the world a school instituted for the
purpose of teaching little children to read – I will call the human heart the horn book used in that school – and I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school
and its horn book. Do you not see how
necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make
it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse
ways! (...) As various as the lives of men are – so various become their souls,
and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks
of his own essence. – This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of
salvation which does not affront our reason and humanity – I am convinced that
many difficulties which Christians labour under would vanish before it. (...)
Seriously I think it probable that this system of soul-making may have been the
parent of all the more palpable and personal schemes of redemption, among the
Zoroastrians, the Christians and the Hindoos.
–– The Letters of John Keats, 1814-1821,
ed. Hyder Edward Rollins (two volumes, Harvard U.P. 1958), vol. 2, 101-103;
spelling and interpunction normalized in the present quotation. The full
1,250-word passage on this topic, written as part of a larger section on 21
April 1819, is available here
(two-page PDF) in the original orthography.

The same phrase and same idea play a key role in
Evil and the God of Love (1966) by
the English theologian John Hick (cf. chapter 13, section 3, “The ‘Vale of
Soul-Making’ Theodicy” (with a reference to Keats in a note on p. 295; or
chapter 12, p. 259 in the second edition, 1977). Although elsewhere in the book
Hick makes two references to The Problem
of Pain and one to Lewis’s A Grief
Observed, he never notes the affinity between his own overall thesis and
this key passage in Lewis’s 1940 book.

Again,
Lewis’s own use of the “vale” phrase may partly go back to a book he mentions
in chapter 8: Edwyn Bevan’s Symbolismand Belief (1938). In his second
lecture on “Time”, Bevan talks of

Time, in so far as it is the necessary condition of soul-making by moral
volitions

and

It would be nonsense to say his [i.e. a human spirit’s] perfected state in
eternity was just as much before his
earthly experience as after it, that,
if it is reached through the process of soul-making in this earthly vale, the
individual’s existence in the eternal state after his earthly experience was no
different from his existence before
he had his earthly experience.

(pp. 113 and 116 in the 1938 edition, or pp. 100 and 103 in the 1962
Fontana edition)

Of poverty ...

» While the previous sentence, with the quote
from Keats, seems a suitable closing sentence for this chapter, the rest of
this final paragraph rather belongs under the first “proposition” discussed in
the next chapter.

“opiate of the people”

» After a much-quoted statement by the German
philosopher Karl Marx (1818-1883), “Religion is the opium of the people” (or
“opiate of the masses”). The original
German phrase – “Die Religion ... ist das Opium des Volkes” – appears in a text
published in 1844 in Marx’s journal Deutsch-Französische
Jarhbücher, and written as the introduction to a planned book on Hegel
which Marx never wrote. For more context and some earlier uses of the metaphor,
see Wikipedia article “Opium of the
people”.

Chapter VII: Human Pain, continued

chapter motto

Hooker

» Richard Hooker (1554-1600), English
theologian. Of his main work, Of the
Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, the first four volumes appeared in 1593,
and most of the other four were published posthumously. In a 1944 essay later
republished as “On the
Reading of Old Books” Lewis mentions Hooker among a handful of
“Christian classics” which he “was first led into reading, almost accidentally,
as a result of my English studies” and “because they are themselves great
English writers”. A diary entry for 4 June 1926 (All My road Before Me, p. 406) shows that he enjoyed Hooker as soon
as he began reading him, which he did in preparation for a course of lectures
he gave later that year.

VII·2|1.
there is as

sins do cause grace to abound

» cf. Paul’s letter to the Romans, 5:20-21.

... the law entered, that the offence might abound. But where sin abounded,
grace did much more abound. That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might
grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord.

Marlowe’s lunatic Tamberlaine

» Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), English
dramatist and poet. His first play was Tamburlaine
the Great (in two parts, 1587-88), about the power-drunk and cruel Tatar
conqueror Timur the Lame. The protagonist is happy to call himself, and be
called, “the scourge of God” – as in Part One, Act IV, scene 2, when he is
brutalizing and humiliating the captive Emperor of the Turks:

Now clear the triple region of
the air,
And let the Majesty of Heaven behold
Their scourge and terror tread on emperors.
Smile, stars that reign’d at my nativity ...

At the end
of Part Two, as he lies dying, he counsels his son to “reign, ... scourge and
control those slaves”; and his last words are

» Nicolas Herman (1614–1691), born in
Lorraine, entered the Carmelite Order in Paris as a lay brother in 1640 and
took the name Lawrence of the Resurrection. When Brother Lawrence had died, his
abbot compiled two little books from his notes and letters and from
reminiscences of conversations with him. The two books together came to be
known under the title La pratique de la présence de Dieu (The
Practice of the Presence of God; a new critical edition was published in
1991 and a new English translation in 1994).

Chapter VIII:Hell

chapter motto

W. de la Mare

» Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), English poet.

Shakespeare

» King
Richard the Third, V.3, 183. Also quoted in Lewis’s brief 1940 essay “Two
Ways with the Self”.

VIII·2|the
dominical utterances

The Dominical utterances

» i.e. sayings of the Lord Jesus (Latin dominus = “lord”) such as in Matthew
5:22,

Whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the
judgment ... but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell
fire.

VIII·5|first,
there is

the noble motions of his victims

» “Motions” (as found both in the early British
editions as printed fro October 1940 onwards and in the 1969 Macmillan edition)
may be a misprint
for “motives”.

Thomas Aquinas said of suffering

» See note to the motto of chapter II, above. In
the translation of the SummaTheologica available at Newadvent.org the relevant
passage reads

A
thing may be good or evil in two ways: first considered simply and in itself;
and thus all sorrow is an evil, be­cause the mere fact of a man’s appetite
being uneasy about a present evil, is itself an evil, because it hinders the
response of the appetite in good. Secondly, a thing is said to be good or evil,
on the supposition of something else: thus shame is said to be good, on the
supposition of a shameful deed done, as stated in Ethic. iv, 9. Accordingly,
supposing the presence of something saddening or painful, it is a sign of
goodness if a man is in sorrow or pain on account of this present evil. For if
he were not to be in sorrow or pain, this could only be either because he feels
it not, or because he does not reckon it as something unbecoming, both of which
are manifest evils. Consequently it is a condition of goodness, that, supposing
an evil to be present, sorrow or pain should ensue.

as Aristotle said of shame

» As appears from the above note, the passage in
Thomas Aquinas from which Lewis quotes includes the reference to Aristotle’s Ethics IV.9 (1128b):

Shame should not be described
as a virtue; for it is more like a like a feeling than a state of character.
... [S]hame may be said to be conditionally a good thing; if a good man does such actions, he will feel disgraced; but the
virtues are not subject to such a qualification.

“their rejection of everything that is not
simply themselves”... Von Hügel

» Here and in VIII·9, Lewis appears to be
quoting this author from memory. Friedrich von Hügel (1852-1925), influential
Roman Catholic thinker of his day, was an English theologian of
Austrian/Scottish descent. His Essays and
Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion were published in two volumes (or
Series) in 1921 and 1926. The address “What do we mean by Heaven? And what do
we mean by Hell?” (Vol. 1,
pp. 195-224)was delivered to the
Religious Thought Society of London in February 1917. Lewis is referring to a
paragraph in the concluding section (pp. 216-217):

The lost spirits will persist, according to the degree of their permanent
self-willed defection from their supernatural call, in the varyingly all but
complete self-centredness and subjectivity of their self-elected earthly life.
But now they will feel, far more fully than they ever felt on earth, the
stuntedness, the self-mutilation, the imprisonment involved in this their
endless self-occupation and jealous evasion of all reality not simply their own
selves.

VIII·9|a
third objection

Von Hügel ... warns us not to confuse the
doctrine itself with the imagery

» From the essay mentioned in the note to
VIII·7, above; the third of four concluding “general reflexions as to Hell”
(221):

And as to the essentials of Hell, I like to remember what a cultivated, experienced
Roman Catholic cleric insisted upon to me, namely, the importance of the
distinction between the essence of the doctrine of Hell and the various images
and interpretations given to this essence: that the essence lies assuredly,
above all, in the unendingness. Hence even the most terrible of the
descriptions in Dante’s Inferno could
be held literally, and yet, if the sufferings there described were considered
eventually to cease altogether, Hell would thereby be denied in its very root.
(...)

Von Hügel’s focus is on the interpretations
rather than (as Lewis suggests) on the images. His further focus on
“unendingness” is in line with a point made in conclusion of the first
reflexion (220):

... if we walk ... in the footsteps of definite and sensitive Theists
[rather than pantheists] we shall find that the doctrine of Abiding
Consequences can, at the least, not be treated lightly – the possibility of its
substantial truth will persistently demand a serious, pensive consideration.

The theme of Abiding Consequences is a central
one in Von Hügel’s essay and highlighted in his Preface, where he notes (xi)
that

... it may be of use to some readers to have clearly before them the
formidable – I myself believe, the hopeless – task which confronts those who would
retain the spiritual teaching of Jesus, as indeed still the standard and ideal
of our outlook, and who yet would reject all Abiding Consequences

As compared with Von Hügel’s view, Lewis’s brief
discussion in this paragraph of the symbols under which “Our Lord speaks of
Hell”, the theme of everlastingness is conspicuous by absence.

VIII·10|a
fourth objection

Edwyn Bevan ... Symbolism and Belief

» Edwyn Robert
Bevan 1870-1943, English scholar of ancient history and religion. Symbolism and
Belief(1938) is the first of two books based on the Gifford
Lectures for 1933-1934.Lewis
recommended the book in a letter of 26 March 1940
to a former pupil, noting that “a good many mis­under­standings are cleared
away by [it]” (CL2, 375). In subsequent years, when Lewis mentioned the book he
almost invariably did so in strongly recommending terms.